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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

UltraViolet, Hollywood’s Idea to Put the Cloud into DVD Boxes

A coalition of technology and media companies are getting together to form a consortium of corporations (say that 10 times fast) in order to help stuff the cloud into the DVD box. By this, I mean that they want to sell physical DVDs and Blue-ray media, but at the same time give consumers access to the same media in the cloud and therefore on a multitude of devices without the consumer having to do anything more than accept into a license.

If they’re smart, labels will just include this project with their products and be done with it.

Among the coalition are Warner Bros. Entertainment, Netflix, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Best Buy and they announced their new project—Ultraviolet—at 2011 CES. The group is called Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem and they’re trying to revolutionize how physical media (DVDs etc.) will interact with the cloud and digital playback devices in general.

The pitch from UltraViolet’s supporters goes something like this: users could acquire what are essentially lifetime rights to movies and shows. The rights to certain content could be easily transferred from one service provider to another if the owner chooses to switch or if one the services closes down. Owners wouldn’t have to fear losing or breaking their movies anymore because all the material would live in the cloud and be accessible via Web-connected TVs, handhelds, computers, and set-top boxes. DECE said families who use UltraViolet “will be able to create an account for up to six members who can access the household’s UltraViolet movies, TV and other entertainment…consumers will also be able to register up to 12 devices” so UltraViolet content can be easily downloaded to those devices or shared between them.”

But here’s the rub: the content will be swaddled in digital rights management, this is software designed to prevent unauthorized copying. While DECE played up the number of accounts and devices UltraViolet users will have access to, critics will likely scoff. Expect many from the tech sector to accuse UltraViolet’s makers of trying to lock up consumers’ content–again.

Even with the cloud in the DVD box, the content on the DVD will still be king. Although media companies have fought long and hard to make certain that people cannot take their content off the media given to them, players and innovators will constantly be opening it up. Unlike digital content in the cloud, the DVD will still provide the ultimate backup for the content the user wants and, with a little tech savvy, they should be able to translate form that into whatever format they want.

UltraViolet and other cloud-content services and licensing for other devices may provide a value-added to the DVD itself; but they’re a value-added convenience on top of the media that the consumer has purchased and not the end-all be-all product. Especially noting the poor track record the MPAA happens to have with technology and strong-arm attempts to lock consumers into specific devices and forcing them to purchase their products more than once to run on multiple contemporary devices.

The less control I have over a particular product, the less valuable it is to me.

However, all that said, the value that UltraViolet could add to a DVD or Blue-ray library would be extremely welcome. It is a little inconvenient to pour over a DVD library attempting to find the movie you want to watch, when you can just launch Netflix or iTunes and grab the digital content right then-and-there. What I pay for digitally offered content is so much smaller than what I’m willing to pay for DVD content that I use DVDs to provide nostalgia and “never gonna let you go” value, whereas I use digital media for my on-demand cravings for things that I might never watch again.

UltraViolet follows the failure of PlaysForSure, a similar DRM plan by Microsoft to allow content to play on a multitude of devices put forward in 2004, but the consortium assures consumers that it will not work in the same manner. They’ve suggested that it’s much more open and will allow player licensees to re-wrap content onto their own devices, assuring publishers the DRM is in place, and permitting the consumer to keep watching their content.

Although it looks like a pretty solid pitch, one major media producer who may make or break the entire project has yet to sign on: Disney.

The consortium themselves is made up of a lot of extremely powerful players in the media field, but if they manage to sign Disney to their project, they’ll be in for sure.

About Kyt Dotson

Kyt Dotson is a Senior Editor at SiliconAngle and works to cover beats surrounding DevOps, security, gaming, and cutting edge technology. Before joining SiliconAngle, Kyt worked as a software engineer starting at Motorola in Q&A to eventually settle at Pets911.com where he helped build a vast database for pet adoption and a lost and found system. Kyt is a published author who writes science fiction and fantasy works that incorporate ideas from modern-day technological innovation and explore the outcome of living with those technologies.